The case against PACER: tearing down the courts’ paywall

US law says that federal court records are in the public domain. So why do the …

If you want to find out how the Obama administration is spending the stimulus money, you can go to recovery.gov for detailed spending data. Many executive branch agencies provide information about their activities via the government's regulations.gov portal. And the Library of Congress has the Thomas system, which gives the public free, searchable access to information about the activities of the legislative branch. But the judicial branch is a conspicuous laggard when it comes to making public documents available online. Theoretically, public access to federal court records is provided by a Web-based system called PACER. Unfortunately, PACER locks public documents behind a paywall, lacks a reasonable search engine, and has an interface that's inscrutable to non-lawyers.

The courts are coming under increasing pressure to address these flaws, and last year, RSS pioneer Aaron Swartz and open government activist Carl Malamud took matters into their own hands. The courts had launched a pilot program that gave free PACER access to patrons of selected libraries, so Swartz and Malamud went to the libraries with thumb drives and used a Perl script to download as many documents as they could. They got more than 2 million documents before the courts abruptly canceled the trial. The documents—about 700 GB in total—are now available from Malamud's website, but there are still terabytes of public documents locked behind PACER's paywall.

On February 27, Sen Joe Lieberman (I-CT) (a consistent advocate of public access to taxpayer-funded documents) sent the courts a letter asking some pointed questions about PACER. Noting that the 2002 E-Government Act had instructed the courts to move toward free public access to court records, and that the judiciary had a $150 million surplus in its Information Technology Fund, Lieberman asked the courts to justify continuing to charge 8 cents a page for these documents.

On March 26, the courts responded to Lieberman's letter, arguing that the fees it collects are necessary to cover the costs of running the system. It also pointed to a number of steps that have been taken in recent years to make PACER more accessible. As we'll discuss below, some of the claims in the letter were disputed by the experts Ars talked to, and the courts declined to answer our follow-up questions.

In this feature, Ars takes stock of online access to federal court records in the United States. We'll discuss how the system got where it is today, look at where there's room for improvement, and talk to two experts on open government about the prospects for reform. The bottom line is that the courts deserve credit for the progress they made in the 1990s, but a lot more work is needed to bring PACER into the 21st century.

The importance of public access to the law

Public access to court records might seem like something only lawyers would care about, but James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School, disagrees. "If there are secret laws, it's really hard to say that those are laws in any meaningful sense at all," Grimmelmann says. "There are lots of areas of law in which the statute is very short, but the case law is incredibly long and important." For example, the statutory definition of fair use is only about a paragraph long. To understand how the concept will be applied by the courts, you need to review the hundreds of judicial opinions that have defined its contours.

To ensure broad public access, the courts have long held that court records are not subject to copyright.

Grimmelmann also points out that public access to court records keeps courts honest. If court activities are secret, the public will have no way to verify that the court's procedures and decisions are fair and consistent with the law. Public access also promotes equality before the law by ensuring that those of limited means will not be disadvantaged by a lack of access to information.

To ensure broad public access, the courts have long held that court records are not subject to copyright. That means that once a user has obtained a court document, he is generally free to redistribute it without payment. But until the rise of the Internet, practical barriers limited the dissemination of legal records. Courts produce millions of pages of documents every year, and it would have been impractical to distribute paper copies of every document to public libraries. In principle, anyone could have physically driven down to a courthouse and asked to see copies of court records, but practically speaking only practicing lawyers and a handful of sophisticated journalists and academics knew how to navigate this system successfully.

Broader and more convenient access to court records allows greater public understanding and scrutiny of our legal system. As information technology makes broader availability economically feasible, public officials have an obligation to respond by using those technologies to expand public access.

A great leap forward

There is plenty to criticize about PACER, but it's also important to acknowledge what the courts have done right. The initial creation of PACER in 1988 was a huge improvement over the existing system of paper records. Working attorneys found it extremely convenient to be able to monitor the progress of cases they were working on from the comfort of their offices. The system charged per-minute fees for dial-up services, but these were seen as a small price to pay for convenience, and such fees were not unusual for commercial online services at the time.

The courts steadily improved the system during its first decade in existence. Steve Schultze, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, tells Ars that the original dial-up system provided only basic case and docket information; lawyers wanting the full text of documents still had to go down to the courthouse to retrieve them. But during the 1990s, more and more documents were added to the system.

In 1998, the system was moved to the Web. Attorneys could access PACER using a Web browser rather than a proprietary dial-up service. And instead of paying per-minute dialup fees, Web-based PACER users are charged on a per-page basis.

Falling behind

The courts are justifiably proud of the work they did to modernize PACER during its first decade. Creating PACER and then moving it to the Web were great strides for open access to court records. Unfortunately, in the last decade the courts have not been able to keep up with the pace of online innovation. PACER continues to serve legal professionals well enough, but in an age where the rest of us have come to expect easy access to public documents, PACER is looking increasingly anachronistic.

Schultze argues that most of PACER's problems can be traced back to the decision to put federal court records behind a paywall. Before users can log into PACER, they must provide the PACER Service Center with registration information and a credit card number. Users are charged eight cents per page, and HTML documents such as search results are broken up into arbitrarily defined "pages" for billing purposes. Even an empty search result costs eight cents.

Paying eight cents a page is not a major burden for working attorneys, who can often pass these fees along to their clients. But the paywall is a major deterrent to members of the general public who access court records only occasionally and are likely to be intimidated by the system's clumsy search tools. The paywall also makes it difficult for academics to perform comparative research on large numbers of court cases, and it makes it prohibitively expensive for third parties to improve access to the documents. Google, for example, can't index or re-publish these documents (as it has done with the patent database) unless it is willing to pay millions of dollars in PACER fees.

As a result, ordinary users are stuck using the search tools PACER provides. And Schultze points out that those tools leave a lot to be desired. PACER is designed for finding particular cases based on characteristics such as date, case number, or the names of the parties. There's no full-text searching option, and only very limited keyword search. Even worse, every federal court runs its own instance of the PACER software, each with its own idiosyncrasies.

There are alternatives for those willing to pay a premium. Commercial databases such as LexisNexis and WestLaw offer more sophisticated search tools that span multiple courts, but these tools have flaws of their own: access is far more expensive than PACER; the information in these databases may not be as current or as comprehensive; and although their search tools are better than PACER's, they're not nearly as good as the leading Web search engines.

Timothy B. Lee
Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times. Emailtimothy.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@binarybits

30 Reader Comments

Having been married to an officer of the court, and worked with courts myself, my impression of why they do this is simple. They think they are above the law, and that we have no right to hold them accountable because we aren't able to understand what they do. They're a priesthood who hold the keys to the secrets of our society. And they think they are capable of determining for us what we should and should not know about what they are doing. The fiasco over former Sen. Ted Stevens is just one example of the corruption that's covered up and ignored on a regular basis.

They have a legitimate concern about misuse of records, but that's beside the point. Public records are public records, and they should be prosecuted for breaking the law. Oh wait, who's going to do that?

One comment: I totally disagree with your comment about searching Westlaw and comparable databases as compared to web search engines. Yes, the searching might not be as easy for the novice user, but for a person that knows how to properly use the terms and connectors it's heads and shoulders above any web search engine. Not even close.

I can search for specific instances of words that occur within the same sentence, within the same paragraph, within headnotes, within a certain number of words of another, before a word in the same paragraph, after the same word, limit by certain forms of words but not others, etc. Of course, you also have to consider that you could be billed $100+ for a single search depending on the database if you do not have a flat fee subscription, but if you were trying to use Google to search these databases for very specific things you'd easily be overwhelmed with thousands of results instead of 10 or 15 extremely relevant results.

I've used LexisNexis and Westlaw extensively, and I have to agree with SoonerRoadie: both of them vastly exceed the capabilities of a general purpose search engine like Google for most legal research purposes. It would be difficult to come up with an improved query system, given the audience and the very limited task.

On the other hand, I really wish they would allow more result sorting options. If I search for a pile of documents, I am often interested in sorting by the order that they are CITED, not by the number of times they mention some word or another. I can't figure why they don't offer that option, when they clearly have access to the information regarding the number of times that each document is cited. I guess they just want people to run more searches.

Even with the search capabilities, Westlaw and Lexis are not at all replacements for PACER. PACER contains a lot of documents that neither Westlaw nor Lexis reliably have - mostly motions and other court documents. Further, PACER contains the documents in image form (absolutely necessary for use by law reviews), which Westlaw and Lexis are only just starting to do, and it makes the documents available more promptly, which is essential in practice.

Originally posted by SoonerRoadie:One comment: I totally disagree with your comment about searching Westlaw and comparable databases as compared to web search engines. Yes, the searching might not be as easy for the novice user, but for a person that knows how to properly use the terms and connectors it's heads and shoulders above any web search engine. Not even close.

I can search for specific instances of words that occur within the same sentence, within the same paragraph, within headnotes, within a certain number of words of another, before a word in the same paragraph, after the same word, limit by certain forms of words but not others, etc. Of course, you also have to consider that you could be billed $100+ for a single search depending on the database if you do not have a flat fee subscription, but if you were trying to use Google to search these databases for very specific things you'd easily be overwhelmed with thousands of results instead of 10 or 15 extremely relevant results.

Sounds like search term ordering and the NEAR keyword from the old Altavista might get you 90% of the functionality without the complex syntax. It's a feature I have wished for numerous time in the decade plus since I left Altavista for Google because Googles index became an order of magnitude larger than Altavistas.

As to the story, I have found myself doing amateur research for posts on legal discussions several times and hit the PACER paywall. Each time I have thought "this is just stupid, with all the things the goverment wastes taxpayer money on why did they decide to make the law expensive to access". The truth is that case law is at least as important as statute in the English law system and so a significant amount of the body of law which all citizens are responsible for following is locked up behind this antiquated system. Oh, and it's not even the cost that's the most annoying thing, it's the uncapped open ended bill. A simple slip in keying a search or a system quirk or malfunction could result in significant charges.

I too agree with SoonerRoadie, I use Westlaw and Lexis Nexis on an almost daily basis in the UK to get access to Scottish and English case law. Yes the interface may be difficult for a novice to use, but the systems are designed for quick and accurate searches in a professional context, and they both fulfill this role well, (well, except for a while last year when Lexis Nexis wasn't compatible with Safari!).

I agree that for philosophical reasons of course the public should have access to case law, as the well known phrase goes "ignorance of the law is no excuse" to criminal liability etc. However on a practical level this would be almost useless in the UK. I have not used PACER and do not know how US cases are reported, but the UK case judgements are at times ridiculous, for example House Of Lords judgements will often have dictas running to 30 or 40 pages where a few simple sentences would have sufficed. This can make working out what exactly the ratio or precedent of the case is extremely difficult, given one must read and compare the judgements of all the judges, then look for items on which the majority agree. This can sometimes take hours, and is simply not possible without some legal education.

Frankly public access to case law is pointless in the UK at least until judges start giving decisions in plain English! It never ceases to amaze me when I compare judgements from the ECJ to any UK jurisdiction, the ECJ judges give quick simple decisions which clearly explain any newly established precedents etc. The UK would do well to learn from this.

Originally posted by ewelch:Having been married to an officer of the court, and worked with courts myself, my impression of why they do this is simple. They think they are above the law, and that we have no right to hold them accountable because we aren't able to understand what they do. They're a priesthood who hold the keys to the secrets of our society. And they think they are capable of determining for us what we should and should not know about what they are doing. The fiasco over former Sen. Ted Stevens is just one example of the corruption that's covered up and ignored on a regular basis.

They have a legitimate concern about misuse of records, but that's beside the point. Public records are public records, and they should be prosecuted for breaking the law. Oh wait, who's going to do that?

Your comment about being above the law may be spot on, but then you lose all credibility by referring to the Stevens fiasco. You may want to do some research. It was the COURTS (in the person of a federal judge named Sullivan) that uncovered the mishandling and misconduct of FEDERAL PROSECUTORS. Prosecutors are part of the Justice Department which is part of the EXECUTIVE BRANCH - not the courts.

Was the "officer of the court" you were married to a prosecutor by any chance?

Originally posted by JabberWockey:PoBiddy, you throw up an excellent straw man

Thanks! But no, not a straw man. Just pointing out that the example ewelch used did not apply to the argument made. It doesn't show how the courts cover up corruption and has NOTHING to do with PACER. Perhaps the federal courts DO "think they are above the law", and maybe they DO think "They're a priesthood who hold the keys to the secrets of our society", etc. But citing corruption in another branch of the government (DOJ) as proof? There's your straw man...

Originally posted by ewelch:They think they are above the law, and that we have no right to hold them accountable because we aren't able to understand what they do.

I work for a small city with a court, and I'm not sure that I agree entirely. They don't feel the need to explain their actions to you because they think they're above you. But generally they take their responsibilities very seriously. As in, we are legally required to do X, so we will do X. It might be trivially easier and far more helpful to also do Y, but they are not required to, so they don't, even if it made X easier to do. It's a very bizarre culture.

Or is there some other mainstream media you had in mind? If Ars is your only news source, don't cry foul when the article you read was scooped two months ago.

quote:

Originally posted by AER:I've used LexisNexis and Westlaw extensively, and I have to agree with SoonerRoadie: both of them vastly exceed the capabilities of a general purpose search engine like Google for most legal research purposes. It would be difficult to come up with an improved query system, given the audience and the very limited task.

++ Using Lexis/West's search syntax to narrow searches by courts, judges, parties, legal or factual issues, and anything else more than basic term searches is leaps and bounds ahead of the plain language searches used for Google and other public search engines. Specialized tools for a specialized task.

quote:

Originally posted by afidel:Sounds like search term ordering and the NEAR keyword from the old Altavista might get you 90% of the functionality without the complex syntax.

That's a useful feature, already present in Lexis and Westlaw, but it's by no means 90% of the functionality. When I'm looking for a needle in a haystack (e.g., claim construction orders from a certain judge in a certain federal district court, in biochemistry cases in which a particular chemical compound or reaction is at issue) then the syntax of Lexis and Westlaw search engines becomes invaluable.

But I do agree, PACER is woefully out of date technologically, and the contents of its databases should be free for the public. Given that funding such an effort would take less than a thousandth of the bailout money that Obama's given to AIG, I don't think it's an unreasonable measure.

Man, that Pacer thing is terrible. Can certainly agree. Why can't they update the website along with the browser?

The thing about the lack of similarity state to state is because modernizing your courts dockets is the state's affair. If we have that federalized we may come to quite a few other issues legally speaking, (state's rights issue perhaps?).

And stop complaining about how difficult it is to get around these filing systems, it's fairly simple it follows a time/case style pattern. I don't know what your problem with the filing system is.

As well the courts have to clear and say it's "safe to use" for every god-damn thing, if you are an attorney filing online you are not allowed to use google chrome, or fire fox 3. IT'S RETARDED

How is this different from FOIA requests? Respondents to FOIA requests are allowed to charge a fee for the duplication and time required to assemble the requested documents, within defined limits.

Storage, domains, programming, support, and processors aren't free, and neither is the input and indexing of the information contained therein. To insist that it be "free as in beer" is to insist that someone ELSE pay for YOUR access to this freely (as in freedom) available information. Unless they restrict access based on anything else except payment, then basically all the whining here is that you want others to pay for the stuff you want, or somebody be forced to produce it for you at no cost to you.

While their pricing may have been too high due to an unaticipated surge in demand (when most of their costs are fixed, and pricing is based on estimated demand), and the web site design might not be the most modern, those entire paragraphs have nothing to do with the major point, which is that all this should be "free", as in extracted from the pockets of others.

Would that more government functions were self-financing, so that I wouldn't end up working from January 1 until April 13th just to pay for all the stuff the politician give away to their buddies.

Originally posted by SoonerRoadie:One comment: I totally disagree with your comment about searching Westlaw and comparable databases as compared to web search engines. Yes, the searching might not be as easy for the novice user, but for a person that knows how to properly use the terms and connectors it's heads and shoulders above any web search engine. Not even close.

I can search for specific instances of words that occur within the same sentence, within the same paragraph, within headnotes, within a certain number of words of another, before a word in the same paragraph, after the same word, limit by certain forms of words but not others, etc. Of course, you also have to consider that you could be billed $100+ for a single search depending on the database if you do not have a flat fee subscription, but if you were trying to use Google to search these databases for very specific things you'd easily be overwhelmed with thousands of results instead of 10 or 15 extremely relevant results.

Were Google or Yahoo to start hosting Pacer documents, they'd do what they've done with other products. They'd develop a custom search specific to that market. For examples, see Google Scholar, Google Code Search, and Google Book Search, or Google Patent Search.

"Google Law" would not only be faster than any of the existing solutions, it would likely offer most (or all) of the features that legal users have come to expect. Even so, I suspect users would quickly find that the Google search worked so darn well that those special searches wouldn't be needed nearly as often.

This would not be a difficult implementation for Google, they already offer some of the features you describe above. For instance, Google's wildcard feature does allows searches of specific instances of works within the same sentence. It also allows specific portions of documents to be searched.

I think the largest barrier - by far - to Google, Yahoo, or MS getting into legal documents is the problem mentioned in the article; that being the extensive amount of personal information not yet stripped out of those documents.

The big search companies would be loathe to distribute terabytes of documents packed with personal information, though I wouldn't put it past Google to develop a fully automated redaction technology. If anyone gets into the Pacer game, it will probably be the big G.

If Google does decide to get in this game, watch out! Westlaw and Lexis Nexis would probably have their asses handed to them.

Hey, im really happy to be seeing this. I've read the stuff at resource.org and sent a few letters to congress thinking I was the only one. I was already loosely familiar with the study.

<quote>To be sure, Congress will need to provide more money to eliminate PACER's paywall</quote>

but this is not quite right as far as ive read. according to the FAQ page <http://pacer.resource.org/recycling.html> and specifically this diagram <http://pacer.resource.org/images/jitf.png> PACER currently has $150 million annually in unobligated assets, ie money they dont have the slightest idea what to do with it. <quote>In 2006, the fund received $447.8 million, but they could only figure out what to do with $301.2 million, the so-called “obligated balance.” In other words, they had a “significant unobligated balance” of $146.6 million.</quote>

And if they are struggling to get rid of this money they surely must be ludicrously spending to try to not lose their budget. Also, tey dont even need a system for end users, they just need to give bulk resources to anyone that asks for them as raw data, and have a unified system and process to 1) check for private data that must be redacted (by law, which courts have not necessarily upheld <http://public.resource.org/uscourts.gov/ &gt and 2)a process to redact after the fact when noticed and have such redactions automatically reflected in all or most public copies of the documents.

This is very similar to the great innovation that came out of making SEC filings and patents and trademark filings free. These things did not put Bloomberg out of business, but instead opened to market to become larger and better, while greatly benefiting the public.

As an employee of a state court, I can say that my state is decades behind even the current version of PACER. There is NO online access to court documents, even if you are a party in the case. You have to physically come to the court house, and pay $5.00 for a copy of a document. The court relies on this revenue to cover its insufficient budget (which doesn't make it right -- really the legislature needs to give us more money).

Additionally, on the subject of private data, under my state's rules (admittedly different than the federal rules), it is the litigants' obligation to make sure that private data is redacted at the time documents are filed. In other words, if you are getting sued by your credit card company, you need to make sure the sensitive data is redacted, and if it is not, bring this to the attention of the court which may then sanction the credit card company for failing to comply with the rules. The court does not police this at its own initiative, though; you are responsible for keeping track of what is going on in your own case, with the court merely playing the role of the neutral.

Having had to search PACER myself, I can categorically say that it sucks. Even something as simple as a case number is not consistently recorded and used across systems or documents. I'd compare trying to find case documents comparable to searching for a needle in a haystack... with a blindfold on.

Heh, this article was an interesting read. I worked on a federal case back around 2000-2005, and got to experience the tail end of the pre-PACER days, as well as it coming online for most of the country. Yeah, the days when I had to push 5 bankers boxes full of documents up a steep hill to be filed at the old Seattle Federal Courthouse at 4:15 were not fun. Being able to sit at my computer and upload a bunch of PDF's instead was a godsend. So was going to all the other PACER sites around the country to access case files. It was annoying in the extreme to find a court site, only to discover that they hadn't implemented PACER yet, so I had to give a clerk a call.

So all that being said, it's kind of sad to see that 5 years later, they basically stopped innovating right at that initial level.

> They think they are above the law, and that we have no right to hold them accountable because we aren't able to understand what they do. They're a priesthood who hold the keys to the secrets of our society.

I'm sorry, but this is fucking ridiculous. This is why they charge for PACER? Tinfoil hat much?

The point that you are missing in this article is that judicial opinions are a tiny fraction of what is available on PACER. Most of it is attorney-generated material - motions and other pleadings, trial-related materials, and so on. PACER doesn't need to be opened up - there needs to be a separate resource for judicial opinions.

Having worked with and in law firms for the last 12 years (Oh Gods, 12 years? :O ) in several IT roles, I've had the opportunity to watch and in to a degree assist with users (lawyers and paralegals primarily) use and adapt to such tools as PACER and WestLaw, along with what was initially the very slow emergence of documents digitized or generated electronically and filed with the courts.

At the beginning, there weren't any rules for e-filing or even standards, and the one I worked on was the 1st in NY, IIRC. I actually had to call the guy who did the 1st one to find out what he did, then make the rest up from there. It was pretty cool to deliver a slim binder of 21 CD's (1 with PDFs, 20 with video of depositions in MPEG format) and see them sitting next to a three foot high stack of books and VHS tapes at the courthouse. (2nd Circuit Court of Appeals if anyone cares)

From there, more and more documents were being scanned onto CD's and later SAN's (a million documents seemed like a lot in 1998.) and managing all that content has since become a department and indeed an industry of it's own.

Oh, and a little aside to anyone working at one of those e-discovery places that still use active X controls - DAMN YOU TO HELL, and buy some Citrix licenses. You know who you are.

As for Westlaw, those who say it's not all that hard have been using it for too long. The West people still come to our firm on a regular basis to offer training sessions on how to use the site. That to me is not an indication of an easy to use website.

PACER is still a creaky old wagon by comparison though, and hardly warrants charging for what should be free content.

However, quetranza's suggestion that there needs to be separation between opinions and attorney generated material brings up an important aspect not really touched on in the article, that probably plays a role in why he various PACER systems are the way they are.

Those involved in the profession know and quickly get used to it to the point of not even thinking about it much, is the sheer volume of material involved. Getting that much information collected, digitized and full text searchable for one case can be a daunting prospect, but for every case, and on a national level? Hell, I think we could solve the unemployment problem just putting people to work scanning the documents, and repairing the thousands of scanner when they broke from the strain.

Imagine every post on every forum you ever visited or heard of, turned into it's own unsearchable PDF or HTML page, only every single post was written by lawyers in legal terminology used protect themselves and the interests of their clients. That's probably the amount of material we're talking about. It'd probably be trivial by comparison to just do rulings and opinions.

The hugely important issue you are missing is, precisely, the difference between attorney-generated documents and court-generated documents. Pacer includes both. While I don't have any reason to dispute your reasoning with respect to court-generated documents, the online, free availability of all documents in court dockets would constitute an enormous privacy problem. Lawyers feel free to assert all sorts of nasty things in court documents (including in pleadings, depositions, interrogatories, etc.) that, if freely available online, would be an enormous boon to those who would spread those nasty, and unproven, assertions around. Think how often the filing of a lawsuit, no matter how baseless, is trumpeted in the media. How often is the same attention given to the quiet disappearance of those claims?

Because of these issues, online availability of public court records has been a contentious issue in every state in which the question has been raised. Different states resolve the tensions in different ways, some with much more open access than others. The fact the federal system hasn't worked out a solution yet is no evidence either of stupidity, conspiracy to hide corruption, or any other evil motive. It is far more likely, I would confidently say, that it is the product of an effort to come to a workable solution of genuinely difficult tensions. Anyone who has ever been involved, for example, in a contentious divorce, would likely quake at the idea the records of that could be available with a mere word search to anyone with an internet connection. It doesn't take a genius or a divorce to know the baseless evil that is thrown around in that forum. Much of litigation is similar.

And, by the way, these records ARE public. But you need to go to the court to see the files. Requiring that doesn't seem to be too great a burden to impose in order to filter out people just sitting on their butts digging up stuff online.

Interesting. I had not heard of this site, so I pulled the docket for a recent case of mine, and their records are incomplete. The case I pulled was closed in January 2009, and the docket sheet only goes through 2007. While I can appreciate a free resource, this site is very rough around the edges. But kudos to them for the effort.

Personally, I think the courts ought to make the raw data available to private entities to design their own search products (filtering and redacting sensitive information and sealed documents, etc., of course). Nothing the .gov comes up with is going to come close to the ingenuity shown by companies like Google and Lexis.

A couple of posters wrote or agreed-with: "[With LexisNexis or Westlaw] I can search for specific instances of words that occur within the same sentence, within the same paragraph, within headnotes, within a certain number of words of another [even more elided...]"

While this is true, it shouldn't be necessary. Consider: why are we reduced to searching for "documents containing words within 5 words of another" in the first place? We don't care about that. Only an academic linguist would.

What we really want is (say) cases which reach the issue of whether driving is a major life function. But since the search systems don't have a higher level understanding of these concepts, we're forced to learn and use the complex text-based searching you described.

Computer science has produced a lot of new concepts in the past couple of decades that can do amazing things if given the chance. I believe that an open API is what the government needs to do to enable true movement forward.

After you retrieve a docket you can update/refresh it by clicking Click Here to Get The Latest on the bottom of the last page of entries. This appears to get live data from pacer. they only let you update docket every 24 hrs, but what do you expect, it free.

As far as I can see, the dockets are almost exactly the same as Pacer.

Lexis is great if you want to pay like 5 bucks for docket.

This is a good discussion, but does anyone REALLY care about free dockets? Lawyers can afford Pacer & Lexis, and does the general public want free dockets? Why would Joe Schmo (or the plumber) want to look at dockets?